Evaluation of Team Performance in Atlassian Confluence: Part 1

Atlassian is the leading supplier of applications for enterprises of any profile and scale. Their robust platforms – JIRA and Confluence – allow millions of teams worldwide to efficiently run processes, manage projects, develop the accessible knowledge bases, and keep track of team and personal tasks.

A lot of teams use Confluence for tracking generic tasks and JIRA for project specific tasks. And the main issue that you as a project manager may encounter is a necessity to have a single list showing the overall workload of your team members. When using native macros you can only get two separate task lists. This factor may negatively impact the process of interpreting this data and understanding who and what is doing at the moment.

This blog post will feature an efficient approach which you can use for tracking team tasks created in both JIRA and Confluence and further evaluate team performance. You will have to set up two add-ons from the Atlassian Marketplace:

TaskONE for Confluence combines tasks from both JIRA and Confluence and generates a single list of them. So you can quickly identify the workload of your teammates and work out a better project development plan.

Table Filter and Charts provides tools for filtering, aggregating and visualizing table data and task lists in particular. In this blog post we will show only filtration of team tasks, but in the next post we will show you the way to summarize tasks against individual employees and visualize this with dynamically updated charts.

So, it’s time to start the evaluation of the actual team load and performance!

Creating Tasks in JIRA and Confluence

JIRA is a well-known system for managing projects of any kind and complexity. The native tools and configuration flexibility allows you to tailor this solution to any requirements of yours.

The creation of a task in JIRA is a quick and easy operation. You can configure a set of fields required for tracking the relevant information, set the assignee, and so on.

The creation of tasks in Confluence is very simple and can be used mostly for tracking some generic tasks, and cannot be a full replacement for task management in JIRA. All you need to do is to type ‘[]’ (square brackets) that are automatically converted into the checkbox. You can further specify the assignee by writing the @-mention and set the due date by entering ‘//’ and then picking the appropriate date in the date picker.

Collecting Team Tasks in One Place

For collecting team tasks from JIRA and Confluence, you can use the native Confluence macros, such as:

The main issue with them is that both macros will generate a separate list of tasks. Consequently, it will not be very convenient to you to deal with two lists trying to compare who has to do or has already done what.

JQL Query – you can enter the appropriate query to JIRA host for fetching the relevant tasks from it. Note, that you need to have a properly configured application link.

Additionally, you can define the count of tasks to display per page, columns to show and set the appropriate sorting order.

Once you save the page, you can view the list of all tasks collected from Confluence pages and fetched from JIRA.

Here you can instantly see the assignee, task type, its description, due date, and source – an issue key or a page.

Filtering Team Tasks

Once you have a table with tasks, you may like to evaluate the number of tasks assigned to this or that team mate. And here you can apply Table Filter and Charts add-on from StiltSoft team.

Let’s start with filtration! Table Filter and Charts add-on bundles a variety of filters that you can apply for filtering almost any kind of content in Confluence.

You just need to place the TaskONE macro within the Table Filter macro and save the page. Management of filters is available in the page view and edit modes. So you can quickly add or re-arrange filters while editing the page contents or do this while reviewing the page with colleagues.

We have added the dropdown filter for the Assignee column, a date range filter for the Due Date column, and a visual filter for the column indicating the created task types. The name of the column with icons of the tasks= types is not specified, so the filter label remains empty. But you can double-click on the filtration pane and enter the necessary title which is further confirmed by pressing the Enter button.

Additionally, Table Filter and Charts add-on also provides different kinds of augmentations that you can apply to the table. This way you can define the default sorting order for multiple columns, enable the automatic row numbering, fit table to the screen area, and a lot of other things useful for efficient table management.

Results

The combination of TaskONE and Table Filter and Charts add-ons can help you with tracking team tasks in Confluence and filtering them against specific criteria. Now you can instantly view all the team tasks from Confluence and JIRA compliant to your request, filter them by due date or assignee, and manage your projects much more efficiently.

Follow us! Next time we will show you how to aggregate team tasks and visualize them with dynamic charts.